


Counting Crows

by Anxiety_Pickle



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Hatake Kakashi, Protective Uchiha Itachi, Sasuke becomes an honorary member of ROOT, Team as Family, Uchiha Sasuke-centric, except maybe danzo, nobody is happy about this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:42:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24482227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anxiety_Pickle/pseuds/Anxiety_Pickle
Summary: A man that Sasuke has never seen before stares down at him, one half of his face wrapped in bandages, his right arm obscured by his sleeve. Sasuke shrinks back, skin on fire.“Child, are you alright?”“Who are you?” He hates how his voice shakes. He blames it on the cold.The man offers him a hand, a kind glint to his eyes.“My name is Danzo.”Or, Danzo takes a more active role in Sasuke's life.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto, Hatake Kakashi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Sasuke & Yamato | Tenzou
Comments: 39
Kudos: 471
Collections: Mixed_Fics





	Counting Crows

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Cracked eggs, dead birds (my brain is bleeding out)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19284307) by [Oceanbreeze7](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oceanbreeze7/pseuds/Oceanbreeze7). 



> Should I be posting this right now? Probably not, and yet here I am. I have no idea how this turned into a 16k monstrosity. I just wanted to write a story where Sasuke joins ROOT and kills Danzo and this happened. I love crow symbolism so that found it's way in here too. This was inspired by Cracked eggs, dead birds (my brain is bleeding out) by Oceanbreeze7.

_One for Sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold…_

Sasuke Uchiha is a cursed boy, the villagers agree. 

Not just for his tainted bloodline, they whisper, not just for the crimson red of their doujutsu, but that, too, is burned into his genetic code, as obvious as the black of his hair and eyes. For the bloody shadow that falls over him in the shape of a defected brother, in the shape of a traitor and a murderer. Poor boy, they say, and turn away from him as they pass. It never did anyone any good to involve themselves with ghosts. 

A tragedy, they offer their polite condolences. It is no secret that no one quite knows what to do with the last Uchiha. They do not speak of his clan’s cursed legacy to him. They do not speak about them at all. It is, after all, in poor taste to begrudge the dead. 

A clan of Uchiha is a threat.

One is a useful tool.

Sasuke Uchiha stares at the rain pooling in the cracks on the stone walkway. He’s certain that these cracks had not been here before that day, and if they were, they could only have been exacerbated. The compound is quiet in a way that settles over him like a shawl, an unnatural stillness, an emptiness that grows steadily outward like a parasitic infection. 

On the roof overhead, a crow watches. They follow him, like vultures to a carcass. 

Sasuke wonders if they’ll kill him, too.

It moves like a shadow, like a blot of ink, unperturbed by the heavy rain. It flicks black gossamer feathers, glossy black eyes never leaving him. 

The rain, at least, washes away the blood. If there was any blood there. Which there isn’t. ANBU had cleaned it up. ANBU had cleaned everything up, and taken everything else.

The compound is populated only by ghosts, now. 

Him and the ghosts and the crows, which will not leave. 

He cycles through all the houses he knows - his aunt, his cousins - and finds them empty.

There’s thick, black splotches of blood beneath the tatami mats. Black like the crows, black like the tomoe in Itachi’s eyes as they had whirled in a lazy circle, as they had changed-

His heart hammers in his throat. He slides the door shut behind him. 

The field of the training grounds is soft and wet. Sasuke can’t remember if anyone was killed here. 

The wet grass brushes against his ankles. He runs his fingers over the rough pillars of wood where a shuriken is still lodged deep into it. It might have been Shisui’s. There are deep lacerations in the wood, alongside cuts no deeper than his fingernail. 

He shivers, cold water sliding down the bridge of his nose.

_(“Foolish little brother.”)_

In the distance, the crows gather on the roofs of buildings, hundreds of them, more than he can count, like shadows. They gather, they watch. Like they know something.

Sasuke startles.

Is Itachi back to finish him off after all? 

He turns the corner slowly, approaching the cracked uchiwa painted on the stone wall. 

He runs his fingers over it.

_Why, why,_ why?

A crow caws, a throaty chorus of _caw, caw, caw_ that makes his heart quicken, exploding like war hammers in his ears. He grabs the hem of his shirt and pulls until his knuckles are strangled white, as the birds start to scream and scream and scream. One takes to the air in a flourish of dark feathers, darting over the high rise of distant buildings with the quick snap of its wings. His knees hit the ground and curls his fingers over his ears. Blood pools around his knees and the moon is as red as Itachi’s eyes. _Caw, caw, caw,_ they get louder and louder and _louder_ until it’s all he can hear, until the snap of feathers and the alarmed, high pitched shrieks command his attention, until he does not register the figure until it’s too late.

A hand closes over his shoulder.

He whirls around, breath caught in his throat as the crows take off in a flurry of dark feathers, like the ominous warpath of storm clouds. 

A man that Sasuke has never seen before stares down at him, one half of his face wrapped in bandages, his right arm obscured by his sleeve. A single crow hopes by his feet, squawking, high pitched and urgent. The man spares it a narrow eyed glare, before turning his way. Sasuke shrinks back, skin on fire.

“Child, are you alright?”

He’s too shaken to point out that he shouldn’t be here, that the Uchiha compound is not open to outsiders, even if there’s no one left but him to occupy it, that _no_ one should be in here because the thick tape cordoning off the only entrance cautions away any curious souls, except for him. 

Except for him and the crows.

“Who are you?” He hates how his voice shakes. He blames it on the cold.

The man offers him a hand, a kind glint to his eyes.

“My name is Danzo.”

The crow screeches and _screeches_ even after they’ve walked away.

Sasuke swallows a scream.

The man wearing the bandages - the man named Danzo - does not look at him with pity. Does not eye the storm cloud following of crows that trails behind him, ever watching, ever scrutinizing. Sasuke hates the crows. Sasuke has never hated anything more. They do nothing but watch when he screams or cries or throws things at them. They follow like ghosts, like a shadow that he can’t be rid of. The other children notice. The adults notice. Danzo does not seem to care at all.

“It’s a tragedy, what happened,” He says, his voice charming and strangely flat, a bit like Itachi’s when his performance slipped. “I knew your brother. He always seemed like a talented young man. I never would have imagined he would do something so heinous as this.”

Sasuke frowns, crossing his arms. He doesn’t want to talk about Itachi. 

He has to _kill_ Itachi. 

He doesn’t have anything else.

(Just his big empty compound and ghosts that live under the floorboards and the ever-watchful eyes of the crows). 

“I’m going to kill him.” He snarls. 

He isn’t sure he feels angry, yet. Maybe in time, he will. All he knows now is that he feels just as empty as the compound and that he should want to kill his brother and that he will in time. So he slips into his role and lets the anger guide him.

“That’s an ambitious task.” He says, thoughtful. “But a fitting one. What he did to your clan is unforgivable. Your desire for justice is more than understandable.” He pauses. “How do you plan to achieve this goal?”

Sasuke pauses and scowls at the wet cobblestone. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t really have a plan. It seems reasonable that he should graduate, at least, and he doesn’t know about negotiating a mission for him to kill his brother. He’d only met the Sandaime when he had woken up in the hospital, and while he had seemed sympathetic enough, Sasuke doesn’t know that he would agree to it.

“I see.” Danzo says. “Then perhaps you’ll consider a proposal of mine?”

“Proposal?” He repeats, a little hesitant.

“That’s right.” His smile is thin, one edge tipped up. “I happen to run an organization that might help you further your goal.”

Sasuke, sitting idly by the late, throat and face stinging from his most recent bout of fire, kicks at the water with his heel. He can’t reach much farther than that without falling in; his legs are too short. 

A crow settles on the grass a few feet away. Sasuke scowls and kicks water at it. It doesn’t have the intended reaction. The crow skitters back, but doesn’t fly away, or appear too offended. 

“Hey, teme,”

He twists around to see a boy with bright, unruly blonde hair glowering at him, face scrunched up into a scowl. Sasuke reciprocates. 

“What do _you_ want?”

“Why do all those crows follow you around all the time?”

Sasuke stiffens, and glances at the crow. Naruto hops down the stairs, and the bird jumps back a few paces. Sasuke watches curiously. Naruto pouts, huffing as he crosses his arms.

“Why don’t they like me?”

Sasuke glances between them.

“C’mere,” He says, and while Naruto frowns dubiously, he obliges. The crow backs away. It won’t come close to Naruto. Sasuke feels… better.

“What do you want me to do?” Naruto frowns.

Sasuke doesn’t reply, just staring out into the still, open lake. There are ash stains on the front of his shirt, which he brushes at absentmindedly. Eventually, Naruto joins him, pulling off his shoes and socks and dipping a toe in the water.

“How come they only like you?” He pouts. “I bet you feed them. Iruka-sensei says animals like when you do that. That’s why he won’t let me feed the cats…”

“I don’t feed them.” He says indignantly. “They won’t leave me alone.”

Naruto scowls at the crows, and then at him. “Why would anyone want to hang around _you?_ ”

Sasuke glares. “ _You’re_ hanging around me right now!”

Naruto starts yelling, which startles Sasuke and then the crows, in that order. One of the swoops down around Naruto’s head in a manner that could be described as _playful_ while he screeches loud enough to disturb the seagulls sitting on the placid surface of the water, batting at the crow with one hand, spinning around until the edge of his heel slips on the edge of the dock and he topples back into the water.

Sasuke reaches out as if to grab him, and then, when he resurfaces, spitting out water and cursing in all ways that he probably shouldn’t know how to, hair sopping and falling over his eyes, Sasuke _laughs._

“Hey! Bastard! Stop laughing at me and help me out!”

Beside him, the crow puffs out its feathers indignantly, as if proud. 

Maybe they aren’t _so_ bad, he admits grudgingly, and helps to haul a dripping wet Naruto out of the water. 

Naruto bemoans, _very_ loudly, the state of his clothing, and Sasuke says, very quietly: “I brought a towel.”

He hadn't been intending to use it, but after that time that Shisui pushed him in as a joke he’s never come without one. Even if Shisui isn’t here. Even if Shisui was dragged to the bottom of the canyon by the river with his eyes gouged out.

Naruto, after a good minute of toweling off his hair, the fluffy edges of it draping over his shoulders like a shawl, says, very grudgingly, “... thanks for the towel, teme.” He takes the next moment to glare at the bird, which chirps, bright and innocent, before huffing. 

“Are you…”

He turns behind him, and Naruto is looking at the dock, shifting his weight between his legs. “Will you be here again tomorrow?”

Sasuke stares for a moment, blinking disbelievingly. 

“... I guess.” He says, which seems to be good enough for him. He brightens up immediately, and Sasuke feels a twinge of guilt because he doesn’t actually know if he _will_ be here tomorrow, but shakes it off quickly. 

“Bye, bastard!” He waves, sprinting up the steep, narrow steps and disappearing around a corner.

Sasuke doesn’t realize until it’s too late that he stole his towel.

There’s a series of interconnecting subterranean tunnels beneath the city, or so he’s told. Danzo is very careful about what information he shares concerning his secret organization. Sasuke has probed, in some ways more subtle than others, for what exactly said organization entails, in not so many words. Danzo insists that he can’t tell him yet. Danzo says a lot of things, some of which Sasuke doesn’t understand.

But he says that if he wants to catch up to his brother, then he must learn fast. 

The man across from him, sporting dark brown hair and blank, dark eyes, stares at him imploringly from where he stands on the water. The one Danzo relegated his training to. He’s a “very busy man”, apparently, and trusts whoever this is to teach him effectively. He hasn’t given a name. He says that he doesn’t have one. His smile is charmingly empty. 

Sasuke fidgets.

“Come on, Sasuke.” He says. “You don’t have to be scared.”

“I’m not _scared._ ” He replies hotly, and gathers his chakra at his feet, as he was instructed. He removed his shoes before. The last thing he wants is to lose them at the bottom of the lake. He swallows, and steps off the dock.

The water wavers around him for a second, and he wobbles, sinking a little bit into the water. 

“Try closing your eyes.” The man suggests. The last thing Sasuke wants to do is close his eyes. He can feel the crows watching him. They’re always watching him but they don’t follow him out into the open water. He squeezes his eyes shut and recalibrates the flow of his chakra, eases it through his body and redirects it towards his feet. Stronger. It stings for a minute, and then it dulls. He walks over water. 

“Good job.” He smiles. “Once you can cross the lake, then we can move on to more advanced techniques.”

Sasuke grimaces and wobbles after him, embarrassingly slow. The man moves with ease while Sasuke stumbles, actively concentrating on his chakra coils while he manages them subconsciously. It’s just practice, Itachi used to say, smoothing his bags from his face. You’ll get it in time. 

The memory makes him nauseous. He clenches his jaw and refocuses, trudging after him. The lake is bigger than he thought. 

They’re almost to the other end when he falters. He feels it for a split second before the water slips beneath him and he inhales sharply, waiting for the freezing cold of the water to submerge him, but he only sinks an inch before he reaches something solid again. He squints down at the dark, wavering image beneath the rippling water.

Wood?

He glances up at the man, who has his hands clasped in front of his chest and a slightly more emotive smile, but only slightly. Sasuke glances back at the wood.

Sasuke has heard the legends of the first Hokage before, the man who made nature bend to his will. His mother used to tell him stories before bed, and later Itachi, who indulged him even after.

“... Mokuton?”

“Right!” He says cheerfully. “It’s a secret, though.”

“Why?”

“It just is.” He changes the subject. “We can take a break, for a little while.”

Sasuke, embarrassed by his own inadequacy, heat rising to his face and neck, only takes five minutes. Every so often, the man will look over his shoulder and spout something of encouragement. 

“You should know your limits.” He says sagely, once Sasuke has collapsed on the other side of the lake. “Your training is only effective if you know them.”

Sasuke grumbles into his arm and doesn’t acknowledge him. Itachi could do this by his age. The thought spurs him forward, the weight of the Sharingan pressing behind his eyes, clamping down on the ocular nerves. Itachi had explained in detail the function of it, had promised to teach him how to use it effectively. 

His fingers curl into the dirt, which clumps beneath torn fingernails. 

“I’m fine.” He snaps, and stands up out of pure determination. His legs sting.

“You performed well.” He assures. “You only just started tree climbing, didn’t you? Water is harder to grasp.”

Sasuke crosses his arms. “Why don’t you have a name?”

“Why?” He looks at him curiously. “I only require a name in certain circumstances. I’m a tool of Konoha, I don’t need to have a name.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Is that so?”

“What am I supposed to call you if you don’t have a name?”

“You don’t need to call me anything,” He says mildly. 

“Well,” Sasuke walks a little faster to compensate for his longer stride. “This is a mission, isn’t it? So you can have a name.” 

He pauses. “I suppose you’re right. What would you like to call me, then?”

He scrunches up his nose. “It’s your name. You come up with it.”

He hums, and falls silent for a moment. “Alright. You can call me… Yamato.”

When he gets back to the dock, the birds are gone.

The crows are wary of Yamato. Sasuke is, as well. They don’t keen and murmur quietly the way they do in Danzo’s presence, they don’t follow after him and nip at the dragging edges of his clothes. They don’t watch from the high rooftops like they plan to peck his eyes out. Sasuke has seen the carrion birds drag tiny animal carcasses across the streets of the compound. They look at Danzo the same. They're collecting a mountain of stolen jewelry and animal bones pecked clean at the center of the compound, and there are less and less crows to frequent it. Quiet, empty streets filled with animal bones. It seems morbidly fitting.

“You’re going to hurt yourself.” Yamato calls cheerfully from the thick branch he’s perched on. Sasuke forces his eyes open to glare at him. “At this rate, you’ll pass out.”

“What’s it to you?” Sasuke clenches his jaw and sits up, his vision flickering. 

The Sharingan taints the world red. Red like Itachi’s eyes had been, red like the blood that won’t be lifted from the mats where his parents were killed. He blinks away the image of Itachi lowering the sword down on their necks, burned into the back of his brain for as long as he lives. It’s a constant strain on his chakra networks. When he reaches for it again, a drop of blood rolls down his face like a macabre tear.

This catches Yamato’s attention.

“Oh, don’t do that. You shouldn’t hurt your eyes like that.”

Sasuke scrubs the blood off his face and leans back into the grass, bleeding hard. He smears his face pink and his sleeve red. Yamato hops down from the tree to look at him. 

“You can’t train if you’re injured.” He reminds him succinctly. “Especially with the Sharingan. You should be more careful.”

Yamato doesn’t even _have_ a Sharingan, and it makes his blood boil. He's an unsuitable teacher for matters such as this.

“How do _you_ know?” He snaps. 

Yamato is unperturbed. “I know extensively about the function of the Sharingan. That’s why I was chosen to teach you. There are diagrams in your compound, aren't there? Since you're the clan heir now you have the clearance to look through them.”

Sasuke already knows everything he needs to, concerning that. Concerning Itachi's horrible eyes, tomoe spinning lazily-

He rolls onto his stomach, propping himself up on his forearms. “Why won’t Danzo let me into your base?” It certainly can’t be fear. Sasuke is very clearly outmatched by most everyone that isn’t a civilian. 

“Well.” Yamato says. “You’re the last survivor of the Uchiha clan, aren’t you? And the Uchiha are a founding branch of Konoha, which makes you very important, if only for posterity. You’re coveted by most political groups, then. Your clan doujutsu is a powerful one - many people want to have you as an ally. So you can’t be fully inducted into ROOT. Too many people are watching you for you to disappear like that.”

Sasuke glances at the crows, and there’s a sinking feeling in his gut. 

“...I’m… coveted?”

“Of course. There’s only one of you left.”

He grimaces at the reminder, and Yamato pats him on the head. “Come on. I should get you home.” 

Sasuke rises to unsteady feet and trudges unhappily after him. 

Sasuke has always been the inferior brother. The second son, with no particular talents, he is useless to the clan, but especially so when compared to Itachi. Once, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the porch, Itachi had confessed that he worried that Sasuke hated him. Sasuke had laughed, because how could he hate Itachi? Sasuke loved him.

He thought Itachi loved him, too.

The memory dissolves beneath his fingers like paper crumbling to ash. 

He wakes with a scream locked at the back of his throat and Itachi’s sword on his parent’s throats burned at the back of his mind.

Konoha is quiet at night. 

He slips out the door and doesn’t bother to lock it because who’s going to come by?

As he passes through the quiet, still streets and feels himself unravel, he feels himself join the shadows and the ghosts, submerge himself in the despair that still smells faintly like petrichor and the thick, coppery scent of blood. At moments like this it’s harder to hold on to the hatred that’s keeping him upright; it becomes a more abstract concept, something he can’t touch.

Once he gets outside, it proves that Yamato was right. His house is surrounded by ANBU. 

He wants to say that it’s because they worry Itachi will come back, but it’s been two months. If he hasn’t come back to finish him off, then he isn’t going to. 

One of them is watching him - Hound, he thinks. He ducks out of the wrought iron gates and enters the city in earnest.

He wanders, and ends up in the middle of the street, his mother’s scream echoing at the back of his mind, turning in circles so tightly that it spirals. Itachi used to buy dango here. 

_“I can’t believe you don’t like this.”_

_“It’s too sweet!”_

Itachi had only sighed in mock exasperation and hiked him up higher on his back, tolerant of his swinging legs. He had always been so gentle, even after his hands were made calloused by weapons training and wrapped with scars. Sasuke rips through the memory viciously.

It was a _lie._ Itachi had been _lying._

The crow at his side keens, and his breath catches in his throat - Itachi killing his clan, Itachi tearing his sword out of his neighbor’s chest, Itachi telling him that he is too pathetic to kill- and he kicks it away. It dodges easily, flapping its wings as it hops back on spindly legs, and once again, c-aw. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. 

“Go away.” He croaks. “Just go _away._ ”

The bird only stares.

The next morning, it's gone.

“You look tired.” Yamato tells him, his smile bright and plastic. Sasuke doesn’t have the energy to do anything other than scowl. “We’ll take it easy today.”

He slides off his tree branch and crouches next to him, waving a piece of what looks like regular paper in the air.

He squints dubiously at it. “What’s that?”

“It’ll tell you your chakra nature.” He says, holding it out patiently. “All you have to do is grab it.”

Sasuke is an Uchiha. All Uchiha are supposed to have a fire nature, he wants to say. All Uchiha are proficient in katon. 

(Itachi had a fire nature, he’s sure.)

When he grabs the paper, and it crackles with lightning, ozone on his tongue, Sasuke’s heart plummets. 

“Hey,” Naruto jabs a belligerent finger in his face. “I saw you walk on the water yesterday.”

Sasuke sets down his food and glares properly in his direction. “So what?” He says, and glances at the ANBU member crouched on the roof, a dark cloak wrapped around their shoulders. He wonders what they’re here for. It can’t be him. They never leave their vigilant protection of his house. They’ve never followed him to school before. 

“How’d you do that?” He demands. “Tell me right now or I’ll-”

“Or you’ll _what?_ ” He rolls his eyes. He was already leaps and bounds ahead of Naruto, in terms of skill, and especially so now. Only after training with Yamato does he realize how little the academy actually teaches in terms of practical skill. _Flower arrangement_ is not something any self respecting kunoichi should be engaging in when they could be learning skills applicable to their chosen field of work. Sasuke spends most of the school day staring out the window and watching the silent ANBU guard assigned to them for the day. 

Naruto fumes. “Just teach me how to do it!”

“Fine.” He snaps. Naruto pauses, startled, and then nods, jerking his head to his chest. “Yeah! That’s what I thought!” 

He pulls a chair over and chews angrily on his rice ball.

Sasuke shakes his head and returns to his food.

Given Naruto’s apparent inability to regulate his chakra to any degree, Sasuke should have anticipated that this would take a little bit of work. When Naruto first walks into the lake after him, Sasuke activates his Sharingan to observe the movement of chakra throughout his body and inhales sharply, observing the strange tangle of his chakra network. It seems intertwined with something else, something sitting at the pit of his stomach. It’s unfamiliar, and for a moment he’s filled with a hot wave of terror, wrapping its clawed hands around his throat, reaching out from behind thick black bars, and Naruto immediately sinks like a stone beneath the water.

Sasuke, heart thudding in his throat and fingers and behind his eyes, struggles to breathe.

Naruto drags himself out of the water up onto the dock. “Stop staring at me!” He spits, crossing his arms as his hair drips water over his face. Sasuke deactivates his Sharingan and stares.

_What was that?_

Sasuke kicks at pebbles while Yamato reads a list of potential jutsus for them to try from a long scroll that rolls off the edge of the branch he’s perched on and dangles in the air, swinging slightly in the humid breeze. Most of them are lightning release, and a little part of him burns with anger because all Uchiha are fire nature and he _isn’t_ , but that’s not the problem right now.

Sasuke knows that Yamato can feel him staring. He twitches.

“What’s wrong with Naruto?” He asks, loudly.

Yamato hums. “Naruto?”

“I know you were watching,” He snaps. “You weren’t trying to hide.”

“You caught me.” He says cheerfully, and crosses out something on the list. “Danzo didn’t say that I _couldn’t_ tell you, so I suppose it’s okay. Sasuke, are you familiar with the Kyubei?”

Sasuke’s eighth birthday passes without incident. It’s a humid July day that he spends at the bank of the Naka river, the cattails and bulrushes making him small in comparison, unable to stomach the emptiness of the compound. He’s not expecting the loud presence that comes barreling through the gates and into the empty streets, the crows watching dutifully from where they’re perched. They don’t make a sound.

He yanks his feet out of the water and stumbles up, and there’s _Naruto._

“What are you doing here?” He hisses. “You’re not allowed to be-”

Naruto interrupts him by swinging a crudely wrapped package his way, other hand on his hip, a determined expression on his face. Sasuke stares at it.

“Happy birthday, teme!”

“I - how did you-?”

“Iruka-sensei told me. Now take it!”

Hesitantly, Sasuke reaches for the gift. 

That night, Sasuke teaches him how to catch fireflies.

When the crows were around, before Sasuke told them to leave, Yamato never took any particular interest in them. He spared them a glance, something so _knowing_ that it made Sasuke nauseous, and the thought had festered in his stomach. At the academy, some of his classmates had made a game out of them. They would lure them closer with the offer of food and shiny trinkets, offering rice and crackers, beckoning them from the lampposts. None of them ever caught one. Sasuke doesn’t know what would happen if they did. 

No one questions where they went.

Yamato is speaking to a dog summon, completely ignoring Sasuke as he looks over a new list of assignments. A list of jutsus is scribbled out in the margins. Sasuke traces them with a finger.

Once the dog is gone, disappeared into a puff of smoke, Sasuke looks up. Yamato is standing very still.

(Itachi used to hold his arm out for the crows to perch. They tolerated him and Shisui, but Itachi was the only one who they ever responded to. Itachi, standing ethereally still as he smiled. The memory shifts. A beak tears from his shoulder, a bird with blood red eyes pecks Shisui’s eyes out.)

“How do summons work?” He asks. He turns away so Yamato can't see his expression, spitting sparks across the lake as an excuse. He breathes another plume of fire over the lake that explodes in petals of a gold inferno. Yamato is watching him.

“The basic concept is always the same,” He explains. “You make a contract. You exchange something of your own for their service.”

Sasuke swallows and thinks of hollow eye sockets.

“Like what?”

Yamato hums mildly.

"I wonder."

Hound watches him, sometimes. He feels the weight of red lines of paint swirled over a ceramic mask staring as he retreats towards the lake, as he walks to school. He debates looking back.

Sasuke understands why they follow Naruto. He doesn’t know what Hound wants from him.

Danzo only ever shows up when Hound isn’t there. It could be a coincidence - Hound isn’t around often enough for it to prove anything, to justify a pattern. But it is a fact. In the rare moments that Danzo decides to personally observe the results of his training, Hound is never there to see. This is one such occasion. 

He watches in the distance as they spar. Yamato is going easy on him, only ever on the defensive. Whatever Danzo sees, he must be pleased with the results.

“You’ve improved greatly,” He says. “Your teachers at the academy must be very pleased with your progress.”

Sasuke shrugs. “We don’t do a lot of taijutsu practice with them.”

“Yes,” Danzo inclines his head ever so slightly. “The state of our curriculum is… not so vigorous during times of peace. I heard that they aren’t letting students graduate early?”

To do that, he’d have to be as talented as Itachi, so he only grunts in agreement.

“Sasuke.” Danzo says. “I think you’ve matured enough. Would you like to see my headquarters?”

The tunnels under the city are dark and cold. Everywhere Sasuke looks there are sealing papers plastered to every surface in sight. 

“This organization is classified.” Danzo tells him. “We must take every measure possible to secure our base of operations.”

Sasuke hurries after him. In the distance, above on one of the many suspended walkways, a woman with long hair and an ANBU mask watches them eerily. Danzo follows his gaze.

“They can be in both.” He supplies. “We are not mutually exclusive.”

“What… do you do?”

“We protect the village from the underground, where no one will ever see. We are an invaluable service to the village. It would not exist without us.”

A very small part of him wishes that Yamato had come with them.

Yamato does not seem to like Danzo very much. Sasuke has no propensity for reading body language, or facial features, but he has seen the way his smile falters ever so slightly when the man talks. 

“You’re like ANBU.”

“Yes.” Danzo says, leading him to his office. “You would be correct in assuming that. Our missions are even more secretive, though. It is imperative that no one ever learns about this place, do you understand? We have many safety precautions against such a thing. If information were to be leaked concerning this place, I’m afraid that I would not be able to continue your training.”

Sasuke knows a threat when he hears one. The great, deafening silence that follows in the wake of that declaration looms over him, digs clawed hands into his shoulders. He feels very suddenly that he’s looking at the face of a predator. 

“... I understand.”

“I’m glad.” Danzo replies, and sounds anything but. “Then I think we can certainly come to an agreement.”

There is only artificial light in ROOT headquarters. He works under Danzo's vigilant supervision, sitting in his long shadow as he sits on the floor, analyzing a scroll. _This is practice_ , Danzo assures, this is amateur at best. A message from Suna, he thinks, though it does not say. 

Deciphering code is a tedious, menial task. His Sharingan is far from mature, but it is developed enough to recognize patterns - that is, after all, it's defining feature. Lines and lines of text concedes little. In the end, three hours of work compounds to a couple of sentences, and this is with the benefit of the Sharingan. 

The room is cold, perhaps purposefully, and he refuses to shiver in Danzo's presence. He tightens his fingers around the pencil and concentrates on regulating his chakra the way Yamato told him to. He still has several paragraphs to go, and Danzo doesn't tolerate failure. He'll probably return home late.

It's become a bit of a game, he thinks. How long can he keep Sasuke trapped beneath these walls. 

Sasuke doesn't like being trapped, but he hardly has much of a choice, now. He's doing this so he can kill Itachi, he reminds himself. He needs the power to kill Itachi and then he can leave. 

He banishes his uncertainty from his thoughts and dedicates himself to the task at hand.

Danzo would have nothing less.

Sasuke’s training continues. On the day of his ninth birthday, Yamato throws an appropriately sized sword at him and asks if he’s ever heard of kenjutsu.

Sasuke is late this morning. He fixes his sword at his hip, sixty centimetres of polished steel, hilt bound tightly in cloth. A little more decorative than he thought strictly necessary, but he acknowledges it as an expensive gift as well as a warning. Danzo had claimed that as soon as he graduated, he was considered eligible to start missions on ROOT’s behalf. 

Sasuke rolls a pellet of cracked birdseed beneath his shoe. He should do something about the shrine of bones and jewelry at the center of the compound, but finds he wouldn't know what to do with it even if he could. He's sure the sight of it alone would scare off a lesser man. Perched at the top, for the first time in awhile, is a lone crow. It blinks big, black eyes at him, and he bares his teeth. It drops a gemstone-studded bracelet at the top of the pile and stretches its wings, blending in perfectly to the dark limbo of the sky. 

"Someone's going to come looking for that eventually." He tells it scornfully. Just another reason not to let anyone into his own personal graveyard. 

The bird tilts its head, as if it could understand. His eyes bleed red and the bird takes to the sky, disappearing into the treeline.

Good riddance.

Sasuke turns to stare at the sloped lines of the rooftops. Hound is nowhere to be seen; it looks as though he's stopped showing up entirely. Sasuke hasn’t seen him in months and at this point doubts that he’ll make a reappearance. He wonders what Hound’s purpose was, and what happened that it is now fulfilled. 

He looks at the pile once more with a grimace.

_“They’re intelligent little bastards,”_ Shisui had said, bidding them birdseed for his stolen hitai-ate. _“I think Itachi’s been training them to steal my things.”_

The thought aches like an open wound.

Graduation is nothing special. Sasuke had considered not showing up at all.

Beside him, Naruto practically vibrates with nervous excitement, catching the proud glint of Iruka’s smile as he passes out the headbands. Behind him sits the crowd of proud parents. Naruto jabs his elbow into his ribs.

“Teme, you could at least try to look excited!”

“I was always going to graduate.” He replies flatly.

“Full of yourself bastard…” Naruto grumbles, and crosses his arms, but his sour mood only lasts a moment before he alternates back to exuberated. 

Sasuke glances out the window again. Once he graduates, he’ll be assigned to a three man unit under the tutelage of a jonin. He grimaces at the thought. A team will only slow him down, and he worries what will happen if he doesn’t commit to Danzo’s missions. Somehow, he doubts group bonding is an excuse that will fly with him. 

He snaps back to reality when his name is called. 

He walks to the front desk, in no particular hurry, and takes the offered headband. He watches the light gleam across the polished metal. He traces the Konoha symbol with his fingernail, the engravement no deeper. Naruto bounces on his heels next to him. “Aren’t you gonna put it on?” He demands, his already tied around his head and a bright gleam in his eyes. 

Sasuke picks at the blue cloth edges and all he can think about is that his father never wore his at home, that his mother had hers tucked away in her dresser once she'd sworn off missions. That Itachi was wearing one by the time he was seven, that Shisui double knotted his and couldn’t untangle it half the time, how the crows used to hide it, taking him on wild goose chases around the compound, stowing it away in dressers and beneath overturned stones and porch mats and how he’d groaned and lamented about how terrible his cousin was, how Itachi had smiled, ever so slightly, when he thought no one was looking. 

Absentmindedly, he ties it around the back of his head.

_Looks like I'm a Konoha Shinobi,_ he thinks. His smile is bitter.

The jonin assigned to them is Hound, no doubt about it. He recognizes the chakra signature. Yamato’s method of teaching him to recognize those was… interesting to say the least, in that his chosen method happened to involve ambushing him at every opportunity until he learned to pick up on his signature before he had the chance to dump another bucket of ice water on his head. 

_“Why,” He had asked, through clenched, chattering teeth, soaked, “Did you do that?”_

_“One of my friends had a sensei who taught him like this.” Yamato had replied, ever cheerful. “Of course, he had it a little harder, since his teacher could displace spacetime. But he picked up on it quickly, so I figured that we could try it too.”_

Suffice to say, Sasuke had caught on quickly enough. 

Not only that, but white hair is a distinctive trait. Sasuke has never heard of the Hatake family line, and assumes that he, like him, is the last of his clan, or close to it, at least. 

Sasuke watches the eraser hit him on the head and feels supremely unimpressed.

“Your teacher is Kakashi?” Yamato lights up. “I was in ANBU with him!”

So he _is_ Hound.

“He’s…” Chronically late, addicted to porn. “Interesting.”

“He is.” Yamato nods sagely. “Once, he tried to assassinate the Hokage.”

Sasuke _chokes._

Sasuke’s first official mission from Danzo is simple. Under the leadership of a senior agent, Sasuke is only required to steal a scroll in a retired Shinobi’s house suspected to contain sensitive information and bring it back for analysis. If it’s written in code, then the Sharingan is an invaluable tool for decrypting for its ability to recognize and deconstruct patterns, linguistic and otherwise. He sets the mask on his face, decked in ANBU gear, and ducks into the night alongside his team. 

The house they’re sent to is a small one, on the fringes of the city. Dirty windows and thick, drawn curtains stare back at them. Lion breaks the window latch and pushes it up with adept gloved fingers and darts into the building, silent. He stares at it for a moment, knowing that a broken lock will show up on any investigation and immediately point to a break in. He’s quick to follow, and immediately turns to find the study, where all books should be kept while they deal with the man himself.

The work desk, crammed into the corner of the room, is piled high with books and scrolls, a cup full of pens and pencils rattling as he rips open the drawer. He fumbles with the lock for a moment before prowling the room for a key, Sharingan activated beneath his mask, before he finds it, tucked securely between the pages of a book at the back of a bookshelf. The drawer concedes its secrets. He finds an incredibly detailed map, one with an unfamiliar mountain range penciled into the Northeast corner, one clearly hand drawn, but with landmarks that he’s never seen before and that he’s sure don’t appear on mass produced maps. 

He was not instructed to bring back a map. He’s looking for two scrolls in particular, but he memorizes it with the Sharingan, the tomoe stilling in its perpetual, lazy spinning, and grabs at the deep corners of the drawer. Two scrolls, both small enough to fit in one hand. He spares the books one more look, before deciding only to inform Danzo that he has them. If he wasn’t told to bring them back, it’s likely that Danzo knows about their existence and simply has no use for them, or he has the administrative influence to get his hands on them either way.

“Fox, are you finished?” Hawk asks, ducking her head into the room. The straight edge of her mask catches a line of shadows. 

He nods sharply and tails her out of the room, locking the drawer behind him and returning the key to its original position.

As he passes through the hallway and into the main room, he’s just in time to see Lion pinning the man to the ground, mouth taped, before she drives her sword straight through his chest. Sasuke stills, and for a moment all he can see is _Itachi driving his sword through his parent’s necks_ before he shakes the memory, breathing uneven, and the others start taking care of the body. 

Hawk pulls him back out the window.

“Won’t they investigate?” He asks, once they’re far enough away. Hawk doesn’t so much as glance back at him as they leap over the edge of houses. 

“His case will be buried. Facts concerning the case will likely be changed and blamed on bureaucratic error. Lion and Wolf are taking precautions with the body to lead suspicion away from us.”

The straightforward manner of explanation is both expected and horrifying. Sasuke feels vaguely ill. 

That night, he goes to the library and searches the records for their target. Fifty two year old man, retired from service two years ago after a debilitating knee injury, no prior record. His report is spotless. There should be some tell, something suggesting suspicion, something to imply he was associated with acts of terrorism, with third parties responsible for heinous crimes. He finds nothing incriminating to speak of.

He closes the file with a sharp _snap,_ fingernails dragging against cardstock, and slides the file back in place.

In the sanctity of his own mind (what should be the sanctity of his own mind, after Itachi took that away, after Tsukuyomi turned his own mindscape into his own personal hell), Sasuke wonders if there was anything so horrible in those scrolls after all.

Kakashi… confuses him.

He was an ANBU captain, by Yamato’s own admission, and yet he can’t show up to train them on time. They’ve been standing by the river for three hours now, seconds trickling into minutes into hours. Sasuke has taken to walking up and down the river, feeling the changing current beneath him, while Naruto watches on jealously from the bridge, and Sakura observes curiously. 

Eventually, he shows up to inform them that they have a new mission - a _real_ mission, Naruto calls it, once he realizes it isn’t advanced gardening. A c-rank mission hardly merits the designation, Sasuke thinks, because C-rank can refer to anything concerning slightly sensitive information or the potential for slightly more harm than the average recent academy graduate could handle. Sasuke isn’t impressed. 

Sakura just seems excited to get a look at the world outside the city. 

That night, he informs Danzo of his mission prerogative, and packs carefully.

On a mission defending against simple bandits, Sasuke wasn’t planning on having to use his sword. He hasn’t yet had to use it in any actual combat situation - when he fights Yamato, the man resorts to Mokuton to block him. Swords aren’t much good against Mokuton.

He’s used his sword in ROOT’s training ground, however. Hawk is good with a sword, and had taken to showing him the proper way to hold it, to balance his weight between his hands. She’s what could be considered prodigious in kenjutsu. His mother had been, too. She had a loving collection of swords hanging in the dojo. Itachi had injured himself with them, once. It’s one of the few things he hadn't been naturally gifted with. Shisui had teased him relentlessly for it. Sasuke had never gotten around to trying them, or else she would have discovered his natural affinity for kenjutsu.

Sasuke isn’t fooled for a second by Kakashi’s disappearing act. That doesn’t stop him from driving the hilt of his sword into the attacker’s temple so hard he might have broken bone. While that one collapsed limply to the ground, Kakashi reappeared in a flash of light as the other had charged for Sakura, standing steadfast in front of Tazuna, knocking him out swiftly. 

Naruto glances at the one under Sasuke’s foot.

“Did… did you _kill_ him?”

He doesn’t think so. Just to make sure, he nudges him. The man groans.

“No.”

Kakashi pats him and Sakura on the heads, and Naruto fumes in the background.

Sasuke knows from the second the faux-hunting nin attempts to move Zabuza that something is wrong. The needles used to pierce his throat are senbon - typically, they can’t kill unless striking vital points. If he looks carefully, the anatomical diagram of the human body imprinted on the back of his eyelids, piercing the jugular shouldn’t have killed him that quickly. He’s quick to unsheathe his sword, but not quick enough to reach him before he disappears in a swirl of leaves.

He exhales a long string of curses. Sakura looks scandalized.

“What was that, teme?”

Kakashi, through lidded eyes, is watching on curiously.

He says, flat, “Zabuza is alive.”

Sasuke sits out as Sakura and Naruto climb trees. Sakura has incredible chakra control - it took him days to learn how to climb trees and she'd gotten it on her first try. Naruto, on the other hand, struggles immensely. Kakashi has been watching him as Hound for a while now, and fully understands his capabilities, which he had demonstrated, upon Naruto claiming that he was sitting out because of favoritism. 

Kakashi, one arm braced over his crutches, his leg splinted, spares him a look that can only mean trouble. Kakashi, as he has come to learn over the past few days, has influenced Yamato’s behavior _tremendously_. The hands in the pockets thing is clearly a learned behavior, as is this particular gaze that can mean he’s either about to be attacked by Mokuton, or he’s about to be asked a very uncomfortable question.

“That’s quite a sword.” He drawls, disinterested. “It looks expensive.”

“I have a lot of money.” He replies. His dead parent’s money, sure, but money nonetheless. And now he’s receiving stipends which he really doesn’t need. 

Kakashi hums. “You’re quite skilled at using it. You’ve been practicing awhile?”

He knows Yamato’s specialty isn’t swords. Sasuke stiffens, understanding distinctly that Kakashi is a _jonin,_ was _ANBU_ and had earned every bit of the title. 

“My mother was an expert with kenjutsu.” Is what he allows, viscerally uncomfortable at the idea of bringing her up, to _Kakashi_ , no less

“I see.” He says lightly, letting his discomfort pass. 

Funny, how he still feels like he’s being watched.

The confrontation on the bridge ends with him barely standing, a second tomoe swimming in his bloody eyes, and Naruto folding beneath the Kyubei’s power. Haku is sprawled on the ground a few feet away, in a puddle of his own blood, Chidori fading on Kakashi’s hand.

Oozing orange chakra bubbles off him, wafting into the air, his blue eyes turning as red as his own. Sasuke looks at him, at the foreign chakra overpowering his own system, pouring out of the seal on his stomach. Sasuke looks into Naruto’s eyes and suddenly, he’s standing ankle deep in tepid, stagnant water, warm and with oil-like consistency. 

The walls on every side are long, complex systems of pipes and nodules. At their center, they converge, forming a cage of thick black bars meant to contain all the power of the Kyubei inside. The air is hot and damp, and comes in waves. Sweat and grime and humidity stick to him like a second skin. He feels disgusting. 

Naruto kneels in front of the cage, in the shallow cesspool of water. The great, bubbling mass of sludge-like chakra produces eyes, bright and red and filled with so much hatred that Sasuke is frozen, his breath stuck in his lungs as the chakra strangles the life out of him. Naruto’s hand is fisted at his chest.

“Leave me _alone!_ ” He cries, slamming his hands into the water. “ _Stop!_ ”

“Boy,” the Kyubei hisses, hot, repulsive breath pushing through the bars. “How do you plan to stop me?”

Naruto chokes on a sob as the vision flickers, and Sasuke digs his fingers into his shoulder. He squeezes his eyes shut as the Kyubei laughs, sharp and horrible. “The cursed Uchiha boy, is it? What do _you_ plan to do here? All of you Uchiha are the same. Arrogance without ability.”

_“The Mokuton has the power to contain the Kyubei.” Yamato says. “So does the Sharingan.”_

“My clan is dead.” He spits, and his voice shakes. Naruto gasps in pain. “Your grudge doesn’t matter now.” 

“Dead, you say?” Kyubei grins, his sharp, needle teeth bared. “Then your village’s paranoia has finally gotten the better of them?”

He tightens his grip on Naruto’s shoulder. “We’re _leaving._ ” He spits. “Leave Naruto _alone._ ”

“You think I will just let you leave?” 

A clawed hand reaches from the darkened depths of the cave, and Sasuke’s pulse drums a hummingbird pattern in his throat, it’ll rupture his veins, the hand reaches for them, Naruto, crying, retching at his side, him frozen, him terrified and paralyzed and _useless_ , just as useless as he was when Itachi had refused to kill him just because of how truly _pathetic_ he is and has always been, and the Sharingan snaps back on. His chakra networks are almost entirely exhausted and it burns, the Sharingan always _burns,_ and Sasuke _drags_ them both out by the skin of his teeth.

He collapses, shivering, on the ground as Naruto sobs into his shoulder and his breath is coming too fast, there’s blood running down his face and his vision is swimming, his heart beating too quick and too heavy. Blood wells up in his tear ducts and his vision swims as he gasps for breath. Kakashi kneels gently beside him and Sakura, freed from Zabuza’s bruising grip around her neck, collapses forward, burying her head in his collar, her fingers caught desperately in the fabric of his shirt, torn apart by Haku’s needles. He’s shaking so hard he can hardly breathe, and Kakashi sighs, resting a hand on his head. 

“Alright, you three.” He sighs heavily. “We can go home now.”

There's a crow waiting for them when they get to Konoha's gates. Sasuke glares as it flutters to his feet.

"Go away." He snaps. "I don't want you here. Go _away_."

The bird doesn't budge. 

Pakkun, Kakashi's summon, appears in a burst of white smoke and pads curiously over to it. 

"Aah," Kakashi pats him on the head before he can duck out of his grasp. "I'm sure our crow friend means well."

"There's a stolen necklace in its beak." Sakura says, voice dripping with exasperation. Her voice is mostly recovered, but he can still see the ring of purple bruises around the delicate skin of her throat.

Naruto jumps at the bird, which hops gracefully out of his reach. "Stealing is mad, Mr. Birdie! Give it back!"

"Sensei," Sakura edges away. "Maybe it has rabies. Naruto shouldn't be trying to touch it!"

"I'm sure it's fine." Kakashi says, just as Naruto falls into the fountain. Sakura giggles behind her hands.

Sasuke picks the necklace off the ground. This belongs to the woman who owns a stand down the streets that sells fruits and vegetables. He only knows this because when he was seven, newly orphaned and buying his own food for the first time, she had accused him of stealing food - which he _hadn't,_ because he had enough money to make the idea of stealing _grossly_ unappealing, and he wouldn’t have stolen apples because he didn’t even _like_ them and she had no proof that he had stolen anything, and there were too many people around and he had been reduced to tears. He turns it over. The name engraved on the inside matches up.

“... did that crow steal Mrs. Mikami’s necklace?”

Okay. So he might feel a _little_ bit better.

“Yes.” He says, pleased. The crow preens.

“... shouldn’t you return that to her?” Kakashi prompts.

Sasuke pretends to consider. “No.”

Kakashi looks very, very tired. 

He’s more than sure Mrs. Mikami can afford to buy a new necklace. That’s what she gets for accusing a seven year old orphan of stealing a dollar worth of fruit - if he was going to steal, he would at least take something worth stealing. It was four years ago, and it’s probably incredibly petty, but where does a grown, rich woman get off on accusing a seven year old of stealing one dollar worth of fruit? 

“Oops.” He says, and very obviously drops the necklace on the ground. The crow picks it up in its mouth and ferries it back towards his compound, probably with the intention of adding it to the bone-jewelry pile. Sasuke doesn’t really care what happens to it as long as it doesn’t give the necklace back. 

Kakashi stares at him, and then shakes his head. “My students are all so rambunctious!" 

"Teme!" Naruto yells. "You're using those crows to steal things from people aren't you! Kakashi-sensei, teme is a thief!" 

"I am _not_!"

Sasuke shoves him back in the fountain. The passersby stare. 

Kakashi sighs and shakes his head. "Kids."

That night, Sasuke journeys into the depths of his father’s study, something he hasn’t been able to do without feeling nauseous since the massacre. Even still, there’s an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. What did the Kyubei mean when he said the village’s paranoia?

He digs through the old abandoned papers in his father’s desk. As the clan leader, he was in charge of most of the bureaucratic issues, if the elders weren’t breathing down his neck. That means there are files - so many of them that it’s hard to sort them all out. Sasuke does not envy the training Itachi had once received in preparation for becoming the clan heir one day.

Though, technically, _he_ is the clan heir now. The first week he had been drowning in paperwork before it had been delegated to the family lawyer, and now all of that business is sealed off until he turns eighteen.

He leafs through the papers until he finds one particularly strange one.

He squints as he looks over it, running his thumb over the words.

The Uchiha clan was struggling financially? He frowns as he goes over the report. There had been several pay cuts within the police branch, and their numbers had been apparently dwindling. Sasuke frowns and looks through more of the files.

Uchiha going mysteriously missing, Uchiha children being kidnapped and no formal investigation being done. His fingers tighten around the paper. 

This room is suffocating.

Sasuke narrowly avoids getting branded by a silencing seal. Danzo is particularly insistent that he gets one, but this is a measure of control Sasuke won’t allow. The other ROOT operatives unnerve them. They’re the same carbon cutouts. He’s very, very glad that Yamato is mostly out, that he’s mostly out of Danzo’s grasp. The only benefit of having nothing was that you also had nothing to lose. Danzo had nothing to leverage him with. There was nothing stopping him from walking out and telling whoever he wanted, or so he tells himself. He worries, secretly, that the Hokage knows, even though ROOT is officially shut down, because how could he not? It’s his city and Danzo is his friend. He imagines sometimes that he, like all the people he and his team have been sent out to kill, will be similarly disposed of. He wonders if he were to walk out now if they would kill him.

Danzo scares him.

Danzo will do _anything_ should he believe it benefits the village. Sasuke has no doubts that if he ever stops being useful, Danzo wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, too. 

Hawk has become a consistent teammate of his. She seems… less brainwashed, to an extent. But she has the same frightening apathy, the same firm determination that the ends justify the means, the same fierce loyalty to Danzo, loyal to a fault. If Danzo ordered Hawk’s death, she would do it herself. 

This is not the kind of thing that happens spontaneously. This kind of belief is carefully developed and curated over the process of years, by torturous, invasive mental and emotional conditioning. Most everyone here was kidnapped and something horribly like hope flickers in Sasuke’s chest when he realizes _there could be Uchiha here._ There could be surviving Uchiha. If they were kidnapped before the massacre, then-

He shoves the thought down as far as it can go. He can’t be distracted.

Their mission is not to kill the target. She has been seen smuggling contraband across the border and has affiliations with the terrorist group behind the bombing in Suna. He’s supposed to bring her in to interrogation. He only has Hawk as backup now, as he has been assigned team leader. Danzo had deemed him capable of taking care of himself. 

The scuffle takes a turn when he realizes she has a kekkei genkai that allows her to turn parts of her body to smoke. They struggle while Hawk diverts the questioning neighbors, and she has a knife and she’s aiming for his throat and he moves more quickly than he can think, and then his sword is buried in her chest.

He forgets to breathe for a second. 

Hawk ducks back in through the window and stares flatly. “Oh.” She says. “She’s dead. Hmm. Danzo won’t be too angry, she wasn’t high priority.” He assumes this is meant to be reassuring. His head spins, and he, mutely, stands up and tears the sword from her ribs. His eyes sting, and he realizes belatedly that he has awakened the third tomoe. “We should take the body anyways. Her kekkei genkai could prove useful.”

Hawk, unperturbed, leaps gracefully back out the window.

Danzo has nothing to leverage against him, so he makes things. 

When they get back with only a dead body to prove, he sighs, as if greatly disappointed and greatly apologetic about the action he’s forced to take now. Sasuke can only watch in quiet horror as two ROOT guards appear and drag Hawk away, quietly resigned. 

Sasuke swallows bile.

“You _did_ awaken your third tomoe, though. Your Sharingan is fully mature, now.” Danzo concedes, and Sasuke knows that’s the only reason he isn’t being dragged off, too. It’s a warning and a reminder and a caution: Fail again, and we’ll hurt everyone around you, too.

Sasuke hangs his head and his fingernails bite into his skin until he draws blood.

He’s doing this for power. He always has been. To kill Itachi. That’s it. 

“I understand.” The words are bland and tasteless in his mouth.

The Chunin exams are a _disaster._

The Forest of Death is a thing of nightmares, with bugs the size of his hands, bloodthirsty predators and equally bloodthirsty competitors. But that is far from the worst. A man peels off his face and grows scales, pale faced and with a fanged smile. Sasuke is paralyzed by fear, but when he attacks he flings himself over Sakura, and his heart beats an unsteady rhythm in his throat, _where’s Naruto, where’s Naruto, where’s Naruto-_

He can’t lose anyone else. He doesn’t think he could survive it.

So when Naruto leaps in front of him, he forgets his fear, pulls out his blade and fights tooth and nail.

_You can’t have them_ , he thinks, desperate, hysteric, as he exhales a plume of fire so bright and hot that the forest burns, Sharingan aching and stinging and burning, the screech of the crows in his ears. _I won’t let you take them._

Sasuke awakens to a pain so terrible he can’t breathe, so awful that his waking mind can’t even conceive it, and his parents are gone, he’s locked in Tsukuyomi all over again, the moon bleeds red and Itachi is _crying_ and Sasuke screams and _screams_ and the crows watch, and cry mournfully.

When Sasuke wakes up in the hospital, Sakura flings her arms around his shoulders and buries her head in his shoulder and whispers _sorry sorry sorry_ over and over, and promises she’ll get better, promises that he won’t have to protect her anymore. At the foot of the bed Naruto launches violently out of his nap only to immediately tackle the two of them in a hug and they’re so twisted together that he can’t tell where he ends and the others start. Sasuke hits his head on the board and Naruto kicks Sakura in the knee and they bicker on top of him. Naruto calls him _idiot_ and _bastard_ in between his genuine concern and tells him if he ever pulls something like that again Naruto will kill him himself. 

Sasuke drifts back into uneasy sleep when the curse mark pulls insistently at his chakra networks. At some point, Kakashi must stop by, because when he wakes up again, Naruto and Sakura are sprawled around him and it's warm and hard to breathe, a blanket draped over the three of them. Heat rushes to his face when he finds Kakashi sitting in the plastic chair, smiling, and raises a finger to his mouth. 

Sasuke ducks his head to stare down at the stitched pattern of the blanket, and wants so badly to stay.

Sasuke flings himself down in the grass in front of Yamato’s legs.

“Sasuke!” He exclaims, and sits down next to him, catching the mark on his neck through his wide collared shirt. The mark that Orochimaru left on him, a bid for power. Something that prevents him from using his own chakra. A pathogen with a noose around his neck, a monopoly on his autonomy. He can’t sleep without seeing fragments of Tsukuyomi trapped behind his eyes. 

Danzo hasn’t eased up on his missions, either. He’s doubled them, at least. That combined with Kakashi’s training is enough to make him fall into dreamless, exhausted sleep. 

And on the subject of Kakashi - he’s running out of believable excuses as to why he’s never available, why when Kakashi drops by his house he isn’t there. 

But Yamato doesn’t linger on it long, and Sasuke, mentally and physically wrung out, has never been so relieved. 

Sasuke rolls onto his back with a groan. “Danzo’s a slave driver.”

“He is.” Yamato agrees.

“How did you get out?”

“You never really can.” Yamato crouches down next to him. “But getting rid of the sealing mark is a start.”

“I don’t have one of those.”

“No, but you have something else.”

Sasuke grumbles under his breath. “Danzo’s the worst.”

Yamato nods, dredging a pillar of wood up from the ground. “The worst.”

“There could be Uchiha there.”

His expression softens marginally. 

“He was kidnapping them.” He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. “There are records of them. It has ROOT all over them.” How can he continue to work under Danzo knowing that he had been kidnapping his clanmates? Was he any better than Itachi? “There could be Uchiha.”

“Sasuke…”

Yamato sits next to him, silently reassuring by proximity. 

“I _know._ ” He says, pushing against his brow bone. “I know.” 

Yamato builds a bigger wall of wood, so that they can’t be seen by the passersby. He twists his aching body closer to the shadows. Yamato arches the thick wood into a dome. 

“Better?”

“Yeah.” He breathes. Quieter, “Yeah.”

It's during a training session with Kakashi when he gets the idea.

Chidori bursts to life at his fingertips, and Kakashi is reclined against a boulder, reading his book, but his eyes are on him. His sword is abandoned on the ground but he's standing too close. The lightning archest and hisses towards the sword, crackling over the metal. Sasuke watches, for a moment.

"What are you thinking?"

Tentatively, he picks up the sword. Metal is conducive to electricity.

"I have an idea."

There is a monster in the stadium wearing human skin and a human face, but Sasuke can see what he is, the corrupted pathway of his chakra networks, the intricate coil of a seal meant to contain a tailed beast. He weeps blood as the human becomes monster, as Gaara’s features, fixed into eternal terror, morph and change, acidic pain wrenching his face up into the grotesque shadow of a cry. The one tails breaks free from its host and there is something more horrible about it than he can put into words, horrible like the hollowed-out carcasses of prey the birds drag around, horrible like the way the moon had bled under Tsukuyomi. 

The crows screech and leave their perches, taking to the sky all in the same direction. A clawed hand, made of packed dirt and cracking sand, rips through the forest and Naruto is there and everything _burns_ but Sasuke has lost everything once and he’ll be _damned_ if he lets it happen again.

Not even the one tails _itself_ will stop him. 

The Hokage is dead. 

The city stands in mourning, clad in black. The sky is bright and clear, unsuitable for a funeral. At his side, Naruto sniffs, and Sasuke has to resist the urge to snap at him. The Sandaime is the reason the Uchiha were segregated. The Sandaime is the reason that ROOT is still alive and well and kidnapping children, brainwashing them, the Sandaime is why Danzo gets to play god, he’s the reason Naruto was _alone._

Sasuke doesn't stay any longer than he has to. Naruto snaps, and Sasuke rises to the bait, perhaps with more vitriol than he intended because Naruto's face crumples with hurt and Sasuke scowls and turns back towards the compound. With a heavy sigh, Kakashi grabs his elbow and leads him back to the hospital.

Kakashi corners him in the hospital as he’s trying to sign himself out. 

“Sasuke,” He says, guiding him firmly by the shoulders. “Let’s have a talk.”

Sasuke bares his teeth and curses him and Itachi and the Sandaime-

“I know you’re involved with Danzo.”

Sasuke doesn’t look at him, and Kakashi holds him more firmly. “I’ve seen you train with Tenzo. He calls himself Yamato now, you know that? I know he was acting under Danzo’s orders. So how are you affiliated with him?” Kakashi pauses, and when he doesn’t answer, something like dread creeps into his voice. “Did he put a silencing seal on you-?”

Sasuke shakes his head quickly. “I didn’t let him.”

“So then you’re-”

He looks at his shoes. 

“Oh, _Sasuke._ ”

“I was seven.” He snaps. “He said he would give me the power to kill Itachi.” 

Kakashi runs his hand over his face. “How deep are you, kid?”

Too deep to get out. Kakashi gets it from the look on his face.

“Alright, alright.” He closes his eyes. _How are we gonna get you out of this?_ He seems to ask.

Sasuke, miserable, doesn’t meet his eyes.

_I don’t know._

There are ANBU gathered around his house again. _Temporary_ , Kakashi had promised, but he doesn't believe that. He doubts they'll leave until Orochimaru is dealt with. They can't stop him from escaping into the tunnels, though. He doesn't know if Danzo is any better, but at least he feels less _useless_. He can't go on missions until Orochimaru is gone. Not any approved missions, anyways. He's confined to mostly decoding right now, but it's better than the vast emptiness of the compound. 

It's almost morning again by the time he stumbles home, two or three in the morning, when he realizes he's being followed. It takes shorter to figure out that it's Sound that's following him. They have a distinctive feel to their chakra. And all four of them have the curse mark, chakra paths looped back and feeding into it.

One on one, Sasuke is superior to all of them. He disposes of the first one with Chidori coursing down his sword, and it's not until they combine forces that he begins having trouble. One of them gets him by the ankle, dangles him over the rooftop. Her fingers are like steel around his ankle. She shakes him like a rag doll, and kicks his sword away lazily. 

"Why would you want to stay _here_ anyways?" She sneers. "You're idling. Those ANBU are looking for you now, you know? They'll never let you back on missions while we still exist, and then you'll never get that power you want." Her sadistic grin quirks up on one side. She leans forward. "You should be honored that Lord Orochimaru wants a brat like you. He talks a lot, you know? Just the other day he said something peculiar. Isn't it so strange how your thirteen year old brother escaped Konoha? He _was_ only thirteen. Don't you think the village could have caught him?"

Sasuke goes stiff. 

"Oh? Does that _upset_ you?"

Chidori bursts to life and arcs up his arm, an uncontrolled bolt of lightning shooting up towards her, making his hair stand on end. She bites down on a string of curses and drops him. He exhales a pillar of fire into the sky, a clear signal to the ANBU looking for him. 

She bares her teeth at him in a wild grin. "See you, kid."

She and the other two jump off the edge of the roof, and they're gone. 

Sasuke paces. It's a bad habit. He walks the length of his room, breath caught behind his teeth. 

_They were trying to rile you up_ , he reminds himself. But - _but_. She wasn't _wrong_. The village could have apprehended Itachi, then. When he was only thirteen even he couldn't have taken down an entire high class squad of ANBU. If they'd wanted to, if they'd felt so inclined, they could have captured them.

So why _didn't_ they? 

He swallows, and the thought festers there.

A crow darts through the wet underbrush, soft with recent rain, drizzled with morning dew. The crows do not see everything, but they see a great amount, and they’re eager to be reunited with their master. This one just happens to be the fastest. It hops up to a waiting arm. 

Itachi Uchiha stands in the bowels of Orochimaru's tunnels. On the ground is a writhing pile of black flames. His Akatsuki cloak is splattered with blood. 

He turns to the crow.

"Where is he?"

The crow concedes its knowledge. 

Danzo has gone back on his word. Danzo has endangered his brother personally by accepting him into Konoha's underworld. Danzo has broken his promise by letting Orochimaru get to him in the first place. Itachi, who in distance and time has come to understand that Danzo’s grand wish for the village's prosperity is only in name, the delusions of a man so convinced of his infallible perspective that death was the only argument he would concede to. 

Itachi will return, but he wonders if he's already too late.

Naruto is leaving tomorrow with Jiraiya to find Lady Tsunade, the person suitable to take up the Hokage position. For now, the three of them crouch in Sasuke’s unkempt garden, one he’s been neglecting for years. He hadn't had the proper tools nor time or energy. All of the gardens are overgrown, now, the grass long and wild, the cattails taller than he is. The stone is cracked, the paint faded, the tiles of the ceiling leaking on some houses. The shower in his house doesn’t produce hot water anymore, but he doesn’t know how to fix it, and he doesn’t dare go to another house. 

The last time he worked up the courage to enter Shisui’s house, with all its framed pictures and his belongings packaged up and boxed away, already dead before Itachi could get a chance to kill him, his unread books on the shelves and scrolls and childhood toys, he had cried for hours, so hard that the crows had amassed a small mountain of jewelry, so apparently moved by his distress they had flocked to the windows, cawing softly as he pulled his knees to his chest and tried not to think about the pranks he used to pull, the fond, nostalgic way he used to talk about his team, how he had ushered them all into the forest when his father was mad and stayed there with them all day. How he and Itachi had shown him how to throw shuriken, how they had taught him how to swim, to feed the birds, with an open palm and his arm straight, low. The way he smiled when he dragged a smile out of Itachi, how he laughed when he’d seen the two of them in those _stupid_ cat ears. 

(The way he had looked with his eyes gouged out of his head.) 

Sakura pulls at the weeds.

“Jeez, Sasuke.” She wipes a bead of sweat from her brow. “You don’t garden much, do you?”

She knows full well that the state of the gardens is the least offensive thing about the compound. He would probably point to the moth problem, or the plumbing problems, or the way some of the roofs leak at night. Stray cats prowl the streets and fly larvae hide in old, toppled barrels. Most of the doors don't lock anymore and the paint has gone gray and faded. 

He grunts in response.

Tonight, he has another mission. He can look for files then. 

"Teme, why is your house such a mess?"

"Naruto!" Sakura scolds, dragging a hose triple her size to the garden. 

"I can't keep the entire compound clean." He scowls. "And you're hardly one to talk."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I've seen your apartment. I think your trash is sentient."

Sakura crinkles her nose and Naruto pounces on him. She loses interest in that pretty quickly and wanders into the main square, and pauses. "...Sasuke, what's that?"

She’s referring to the mountain of stolen jewelry.

“The crows like to steal things.”

Sakura doesn’t look like she even knows where to _begin_ with that. 

“How much money do you think we could make if we sold that?” Sakura drives an elbow into Naruto’s ribs. “We can’t sell it, it’s stolen! Sasuke, why didn’t you give it back?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know where it came from. Besides,” He deadpans. “It’s rude to return a gift.”

Sakura sputters. She regains composure quickly enough, before dragging Naruto back to the garden. Sasuke glances at the mountain of stolen jewelry and sighs, thinking about the frantic way the pile grew any time he was upset. Discomfort writhes in his stomach.

Later that day, the coattails of the afternoon riding into evening, he's ambushed by Yamato, Chidori flickering instinctively to life and Mokuton rises behind him. 

“Hi.” He says. Sasuke sighs, all the breath leaving him, and deactivates Chidori. 

Sasuke glances around the lake, but it’s still. There’s no evidence of eavesdropping, but it doesn’t make him feel any better. Old streets listen.

“What’s Danzo planning?”

“So you caught on.”

“I’ve been receiving all my orders through Hawk.” He snaps, and Yamato spares him a strange look at the name. Sasuke doesn’t know if she has a name, if she remembers it, but she seems to prefer he continue calling her by that designation. Maybe she likes the consistency. He’s been forced to decode files for the past week and the monotony is driving him insane, scoring through lines of code in search of a distinguishable pattern. He hasn’t seen Danzo since the Hokage died, and he fears it’s for the worst. 

“Danzo… has significant political influence.”

“Obviously.” He snaps. If he can cover ROOT up, if he had so much sway in the Sandaime’s decisions, if he had a position of the Council and the authority to pluck whatever details out of an investigative case he wanted to conceal his illicit organization, then he had to be deeply entrenched in the political going ons of Konoha. “Are you saying-”

“I am.” The look on his face is grim.

He’s suggesting that Danzo has the ability to become Hokage, he realizes with a cold jolt of horror. If Danzo were to become Hokage, not only would the Council have even more influence over the Hokage position to the point of near complete control, it would give him free reign to reinstate ROOT, not to mention implement whatever social reconstruction he deemed necessary. Danzo exists in a perpetual state of wartime philosophy. That there is no time to be spared for empathy, that the cost of life, no matter how great, is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Danzo doesn’t seem to grasp the concept that peace is the natural state of things and war is created to make peace when it won’t come easily. He feeds off the exploitation of smaller nations and in the self assured philosophy of his own infallibility. 

He needs to go. He can’t let Danzo become Hokage. He won’t. 

Yamato catches his arm. 

“Sasuke?”

He knows Yamato won’t stop him. He wants to shove a sword down Danzo's throat as much as he does. 

“Be careful.”

Sasuke nods, "I promise."

Sasuke slips into Danzo’s office under the guise that he’s turning in one of his decoded files. It won’t look suspicious considering how much time he spends in there, under his supervision, and especially not when he appears to be delivering a file to him. Sasuke chooses this particular time because he knows that Danzo isn’t there - he’s attending a conference that is so obviously a power grab it hurts to think about.

One benefit to his training is that it includes picking locks. Danzo is so confident in his ability to properly brainwash his underlings that he doesn’t have to worry about the threat of mutiny from any of them. He doesn’t even bother with extra precautions. Strange, for a man so paranoid.

He tries the first drawer in the desk, rooting around for anything to do with the massacre. His heart clenches just thinking about it, but he has an idea forming and he doesn’t want to even consider it, how could he even _fathom-_

He sifts through filing cabinets and paper stacks and eventually he finds an incomplete file. He’s not stupid enough to believe that Danzo would leave anything so important there unguarded and full of things that anyone could take advantage of. He opens it up, _classified_ printed across the top in bold red lettering. He opens it anyways, thumbing through evidence of conflict between the Uchiha clan and the other clans in power, and finds nothing forthcoming. Eventually, though, he stumbles into something more informative.

Correspondence between his father and the Elders. 

Sasuke pauses, and swallows down rising nausea. He doesn’t know what this file will divulge. His fingers are shaking.

The date-

That’s-

_Seven for a secret never to be told._

On the plastic chair in front of Danzo’s desk, he shakes. 

A coup. They had been planning a _coup._

And the village _knew-_

He doesn’t have the chance to read any further. He stuffs whatever files he was reading back where they belonged, locked securely, with fingers that tremble so badly he can barely push the drawer shut. His breath is coming too short. Danzo is rounding the corner, and Sasuke pretends everything is normal, that he has just entered and the file is on his desk and that he isn’t shaking, that he isn’t a second from unravelling because _why did Itachi do it why was he crying that day why-_

The door clicks open. Sasuke hides his hands beneath his thighs. If Danzo notices, he doesn’t say a thing. 

“Sasuke,” He greets, voice gravelly. “You’ve finished your report.”

“Yes.” His voice doesn’t shake. 

“If you’re finished with that, then perhaps you wouldn’t mind joining one of the teams going out tonight.”

“I’m under-”

“Guard, yes, I'm aware. But it shouldn’t take too long. We’re missing a member today,” Which means that someone got killed, though he can’t be sure if it was by Danzo’s hand or some outside force, “And the head has requested a six man team. If you aren’t busy, then you’ll be best to fill the position.”

He should refuse. He should say no. Because something is wrong. Something is _wrong_ and he can’t put his finger on what it is. But he can’t say no to Danzo. If the man has the slightest suspicion that Sasuke knows something, that Sasuke plans to do something, he’ll be disposed of. 

“Any trouble you get in I can take care of.” He reassures. “I am in the position to do so.”

_Bastard,_ he thinks viciously, and when he settles his hands on his knees they don’t shake. He isn’t thinking straight. Every thought he has leads straight back to Itachi, lowering his blade, Itachi, slaughtering his clan, his clan that was planning a coup, Itachi, crying-

“... I accept.”

His tongue feels like lead.

Sasuke can’t focus as his team leads him farther into the forest. His heartbeat could rupture his veins, might shatter his sternum, and something is wrong, something is so, so very wrong. 

In the distance, a crow is _shrieking._

Hawk stops. Her hand comes to the sword on her back. Sasuke stumbles, and realizes a second too late that the weapon is being turned on him. 

His eyes bleed red and he’s bringing his sword up to counter her blow immediately, arms trembling as they struggle for leverage. But Sasuke doesn’t have time to waste because he has four other opponents to fight, too, and he won’t survive this.

Danzo has finally had enough of him. Danzo has decided he’s not worth the trouble and he’s going to kill him. 

Hawk brings her sword down so fast that it almost takes his arm off.

Chidori erupts around him, funneling through his sword as he leaps through the branches, bramble scratching his back and sides. Speed is his asset, he’s small and he’s fast. He can use that. If he gets them alone - if he can lead them away from each other, than maybe-

He can sense Dragon behind him - he’s the fastest.

He jumps to the forest floor, slamming his hands on the ground. A wave of earth shoots up behind him and he hears a strangled curse as he hurtles over it, right into a well-placed fireball. It catches him on the chest and shoulder, but it isn’t enough to stop him. He’s not fast enough to fully escape the range of his kunai, but he is able to keep it away from vital points. It slashes open his shoulder and he takes his opportunity to put his Chidori-crackling sword through his stomach. He doesn’t wait as he throws himself into the underbrush. Owl and Wolf are next. Wolf stomps down and the earth splits in two. Sasuke jumps to the trees and exhales a pillar of fire.

Before he can recover, Sasuke jumps down and swings his sword through his side. Wolf stands and _takes_ it.

Which means-

He whirls around to see Hawk, sword raised above her head, swinging down so fast that he won’t have time to stop it-

She hesitates.

Sasuke can’t waste more than a second, that realization rattling in his chest, as he sweeps her legs out from under her and locks her in a genjutsu.

He still can’t fight the remaining two by himself, though. His chakra is running low, from decoding with the Sharingan for so long, and the curse mark burns on his neck, eating away at his chakra and he has to physically battle it back as he moves, indescribable pain sinking its nails into him and _pulling-_

He flattens himself to the ground, trying to catch his breath. He doesn’t think he can use Chidori again and he’s bleeding out of his shoulder, the curse mark is creeping up his skin-

But he doesn’t see anyone following him yet.

Cautiously, he gets up and continues. 

“Oh, Sasuke.” Comes a voice from behind him. He freezes, and there comes the tumultuous storm of shock, terror, hate. “I had really hoped it wouldn’t come to this. You had so much potential.”

“You-” He cuts himself off, strangled. It’s no surprise that Danzo wants him dead. “You knew about-”

“Your traitorous clan had to die.” The way he says it is so convinced that it makes him nauseous. “And now I’m afraid you do, too. It’s a shame,” He sighs. “Your brother was such a loyal soldier. Too bad that you won’t follow his footsteps.”

“It was you.” The warmth drains from his veins. “You made him-”

“It was the will of fire.” He says, as he unravels the bandages on his arms, and there are eyes, something so horrible, mutilated and grotesque that bile climbs in his throat and his vision wavers as the Sharingan seals it into his brain, something so awful that he can’t breathe, _Sharingan eyes,_ tomoe spinning lazily, blood pooling where they must have been ripped from their eye sockets down his arm. He pulls off the bandages on his head and Sasuke moves reflexively, the horror building in his stomach as the white bandages fall away-

He thrusts his sword forward, forcing Chidori into the metal-

Tomoe pinwheel into a six pointed star, in his mind’s eye, and there’s _Shisui, Itachi, reaching out, a thousand foot fall dropping him into ravine below, blood oozing down sightless eyes, crows pecking away at hollow eye sockets-_

Sasuke can’t see through the haze of red and hopes he’ll go blind but the Sharingan imprints everything it sees onto his mind, Shisui’s eye in Danzo’s head, the distant roaring of flames, cold flames, flames that eat and flames that do not produce smoke. The flames that will destroy everything if he lets them, the flames that will take him and Danzo and the image of Shisui and Itachi behind his eyes-

The flames _roar_ and there's _screaming_ and he can't tell who it is.

There’s a faint aura of purple rising around him as Danzo rips at the seals at his arm but Sasuke can’t see him and his sword is buried in his chest and he doubles forward and screams, the pain of the curse mark inconsequential, he can’t differentiate reality from the thick haze of genjutsu and the moon is red and the flames burn, and burn, and burn. 

He isn't sure when he drags himself up and away, isn't sure of how long it takes for him to force himself up and away, isn't sure he feels anything at all.

He tears at his hair, fingers sinking into the curse mark at his neck, stares up at the bloody sky with bleeding eyes, blood running down his face, hands at his throat, the six pointed star is _everywhere,_ and hopes he burns alive. 

Kakashi follows the crow through the forest, following the trail of snapped weapons turned over in the dirt. It caws urgently, black wings unfurling as it hovers over branches. Kakashi glances over his shoulder. He lost Yamato somewhere behind him. He assumes he's taking care of the last of the ROOT operatives. 

Kakashi stops when he sees the wall of black flames. _Amaterasu_.

He smooths a hand through his hair and dread stirs in his gut. 

"Where's Sasuke?"

The crow makes another high, distressed noise, and Kakashi spots the bright red smear of blood on the ground. 

He breaks into a run, then, sensing for him - it's difficult; the flames are bright pillars of energy, the divine power of the Uchiha to burn the world to ashes. It muddles his vision, but there's a weak pulse, like a shuddering heartbeat, leading away from the flames. If he looks within, he can see a charred, blackened corpse, a sword burned half to ashes lodged in its ribs, and he can only hope that Sasuke is in better shape.

He finds Sasuke staring at him sightlessly, blood pouring down his face as the Mangekyo Sharingan whorls in his eyes. The horrible six pointed star of a dojutsu that will take everything. The purple glow of Susano manifests around him, pulsing desperately despite the chakra exhaustion, and Kakashi can make out the knobs of vertebrae, of a spine, at his back, amorphous, bubbling ribs stretching from each one as it struggles to build itself as a physical deterrent to Sasuke's distress.

"Sasuke." He says, dropping to his knees beside him. He squeezes his eyes shut, heels of his palms at his eyes, and he grabs his wrists. “ _Sasuke._ ”

He squirms against him. "No, no, _no_ -"

"It's okay," He lies, because he doesn't know what else to say. Doesn't know what else he _can_ say. He wraps his arms around him. "You're okay."

Nails bite into his back, hard enough to draw blood. 

And he keeps saying it until the screams muffled into his shoulder quiet. 

_Eight for heaven, nine for hell..._

Three days later, Sasuke wakes to a world where ROOT has been disbanded. His room is empty, though there are voices behind the door. He blocks them out.

Instead, he makes for the open window and doesn't look back.

It's strange to think of Hawk with a name, with a family. A new one, albeit, but a family nonetheless. She doesn't question the hospital gown, which he's grateful for, because he doesn't think he could answer her if she did. He's not sure how much longer he can keep himself upright, either. 

Her house - her family's house - is quaint, if a little boring. Beige paint and he's standing barefoot on patio stone warmed by the sun. Before him, Hawk reclines on a chair, and he can't keep names straight right now, can't blink without seeing his never ending nightmare at the back of his eyes, feels sick whenever he stops long enough to process anything. 

"Why did you save me?" He asks.

"I didn't save you. I just didn't _kill_ you."

"In that situation it's the same thing. You had orders to kill me. Why didn't you?"

Hawk watches him contemplatively, the shadows beneath his eyes, bloody tear tracks creased into his face. 

"If I had been in your position I might have killed myself. Saved everyone the trouble." She says after a moment. "I don't think I consciously admitted it even to myself, because if I can't say it what's the point of thinking it, but there were things I wanted that didn't necessarily align with what Danzo wanted." She trips over his name momentarily, and his heart is in his throat as he remembers burning Danzo to ash, even if he didn't see it he knows he did, that he summoned Amaterasu with the subconscious desire to destroy Danzo, to render him nothing but ashes. "And when I went to kill you - when I had my orders to and I should have. I just couldn't. As simple as that."

Sasuke understands. He understands flinging himself in front of Haku so that Naruto wouldn't be hurt, remembers challenging a Sannin to protect his teammates.

"... I see."

Even without her mask, Hawk is still as impassive. Still as impossible to read.

"Do you resent me for killing him?" The world tilts.

Hawk smiles. "Not at all."

Sasuke is questioned the minute he sets foot back in the hospital. The med nin are on him immediately, Tsunade right after. Naruto barges into his hospital room with a white haired man just behind him, and Sakura is soon to follow. They sit on either side of the bed as he's asked to recount his experience and he can barely get past the first sentence. Eventually it's Naruto who drives them out, when the words won't come, and slams the door after them. Sakura laughs at the baffled expressions of everyone that was just forcefully ejected, and Naruto declares that they were 'annoying him' and that they had to go. 

Sasuke breathes something like a smile and for a moment, can forget.

Kakashi stands at the edge of the forest, with his hands in his pockets. He glances at the crow hopping by his feet, big, dark eyes watching him expectantly. 

“You can come out, Itachi.”

Shadow materializes into person, feathers and ink becoming muscle and sinew. Two dark pairs of eyes, almost as dark as the crow on the ground, stare expectantly at him. Kakashi understands now, from what Sasuke had told him, in his shaking voice, breathless, fragmented, and what he can confer, what happened. What Itachi had been ordered to do. 

“You know, everyone knows what happened.” Kakashi says mildly. His spine is wound up with tension. “You don’t have to pretend anymore. You can come back to the village. You can see him again.”

Itachi remains impassively silent, and then, “He’ll find me when he’s ready.” He gestures to the crow at Kakashi’s feet, who, eager to comply to his wishes, flutters down on his arm, as a perch.

“So he can do what?” _Are you still looking to die?_

“Whatever he wants. If he wants to talk, I’ll listen. If he wants answers, I’ll give them. If he wants to fight, I will.”

Itachi shifts, and the crow flaps its wings for balance. 

“Look after him.”

“Itachi-”

“Promise me.”

Kakashi sighs. “Of course.”

On his face is the ghost of a smile. 

The Uchiha compound is just like he remembers it, ghosts prowling the streets like smoke. Overgrown gardens and cracked stone, faded paint and silence. In the main street is a pile of tiny, calcified animal bones and stolen jewelry. There’s blood painted into the cobblestone, misfortune ground into the dirt itself. The knowledge that accompanies these things hangs over his head like the blade of a guillotine. 

_Itachi was ordered to do it._

His fingers turn white around the dilapidated fence, the one that runs straight into the ground. It sways beneath his hold, but he doesn’t feel it. 

His entire childhood has been a lie perpetuated by Danzo, the same person who claimed to want to help him, the same person who had ordered the genocide of his clan, the same person who had validated his goal to kill his brother. His breathing comes fast and sharp, like shrapnel in his chest.

A crow keens.

It has a necklace in its mouth, which it drops at his feet. Sasuke picks it up. 

Hesitantly, he reaches an arm out. The crow tilts its head and, with equal uncertainty, jumps to his arm. The weight isn’t quite enough to unbalance him, but it’s close. 

“...thank you.” He says quietly. It makes a trilling noise, and hops back off. It heads towards the treeline. 

Sasuke’s heart is beating too hard in his chest. He follows the crow. Every once in a while it will turn back and look at him with strange, glassy eyes, judging his reaction. It never flies and it never walks too fast for him to keep up. It leads him to the forest.

Sasuke swallows. The crow disappears into the foliage. He knows inside is the person he’s been waiting to see, he knows inside is his brother, and that he’s giving him a choice. That he doesn’t have to choose now if he doesn’t want to, if he can’t. 

He stalls, toeing the line. 

He can turn away now, if he wants to. 

He stares into the darkness, and steps inside.

_(And ten for the devil himself)._

**Author's Note:**

> If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I had fun writing this and I hope you liked it!


End file.
